Louis Armstrong

At eleven, Louis Armstrong had left school and was helping support himself in New Orleans. He sold newspapers, delivered coal, and sang on street corners. On New Year's Eve in 1912, he took a pistol and fired it into the air. Police arrested him; a court sent him to the Colored Waif's Home for Boys.

The home used military routines and corporal discipline. Peter Davis, its music teacher, first judged Louis by the reputation of the neighborhood he came from. Louis kept returning to the music program. In his memoir, he wrote that each boy could choose a vocation and that he would “make a bee line to Mr. Davis and his music.”

Davis did not begin with the cornet. He placed Louis in the vocal group, then moved him through percussion, alto horn, and bugle. Louis learned breath control, pitch, tone, and how to read music. The cornet came later. Step by step, Davis turned the boy's attraction to music into regular, supervised work.

The work changed Davis's view. He brought Louis into the brass band and eventually made him its leader. The band performed around New Orleans. Armstrong was still confined, but he now had rehearsals, responsibility for other players, and a clear connection between practice and trust.

Armstrong left the home in 1914 and found work playing around New Orleans. Cornetist Joe “King” Oliver later mentored him into professional bands and recordings; Armstrong went on to reshape jazz. Confinement was not a gift, and hardship did not produce his talent. Whatever Davis's first judgment of the boy, he taught the skills in sequence, watched the work, and enlarged the responsibility when Louis was ready.